With multiple vendors and platforms in play, a growing number of devices connecting to the network and the need to manage it all – it’s easy to see why organizations can feel overwhelmed, unsure of the first step to take towards network management and security.

Automated tasks make processes better for everyone involved, and result in a happy IT department, where leaders are empowered to live up to their professional potential without being cut off at the knees.

Embracing new technologies that help intelligently automate parts of security to provide overwhelmed security teams a hand is a start. But in the long run, bigger changes to security strategies will need to take place. Everyone in a company needs to be responsible for security, not just the CISO.

This April Fool’s Day, let’s acknowledge that a security strategy focused exclusively on patching and prevention is a fool’s errand and let’s move towards an adaptive approach that includes prevention, detection, continuous visibility and response.

User provisioning platforms are at the heart of an identity management and governance infrastructure. Let’s just put it this way—if you haven’t automated your user provisioning by now to some degree, you’re doing it wrong.

Your security team is getting alerts from internal sensors, threat intelligence from multiple sources, and potential indicators of attack or compromise from your SIEM. Relying on these human filters to decode, deduce, and decide what is relevant takes valuable time and can result in long delays between attack, detection, and containment.

Want to see how infosec integrates into a DevOps work stream? Watch this fantastic talk by Justin Collins, Neil Matatall, and Alex Smolen from Twitter, called “Put Your Robots To Work: Security Automation at Twitter..."

We need to evolve our security capabilities to a point where both the detection and the countermeasures can be automated and automatic. That is the only way we’ll get fast enough to prevent or at least significantly limi) the damage from unexpected attacks. The problem? We don’t tend to trust automation...

Patch management systems enable you to maintain full control of your systems’ patching activities. You can deploy security patches to test machines, and then push them out to all the rest of your machines, and also run reports to ensure that you have 100% compliance across all servers and workstations...

The amount of time many companies spend on patching, the problems they have deploying patches, the perception that patching causes problems, and a general lack of understanding about what it takes to patch, all combine to make patching such a major issue...

SACM needs to grow upward and outward from where the SCAP efforts have gotten – move from controls into control frameworks and support the policies, processes, and procedures derived from Operational Risk Management. We’ve got a lot of work ahead. It’s all worth it...

The bottom line: Attackers are always looking for mistakes, outliers, and inconsistencies so they can use them against you. This means your security programs need to be robust, resilient, measurable, and – as much as possible – consistent (vs. ad hoc)...